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Friday, 12 October 2012

Tendency to 'move against' others predicts managerial derailment

Derailment
is when a manager with a great track record hits the skids, often
spectacularly. It's highly undesirable, for the disruption and human
harm it can involve, and its costs, which after tallying up lost
productivity, transition, and costs of a new hire, can exceed twice
an annual salary in the case of executive departures.

As a
result, organisational researchers have developed measures of
'derailment potential' that consider key suspect behaviours such as
betraying trust, deferring decisions, or avoiding change. Work to
date has confirmed that managers fired from organisations are judged
to be higher in these derailers, but these were post-hoc judgments
that could have reflected biased hindsight rather than honest
evaluations.

To avoid this, a new study led by Marisa Carson utilises
database information on 1,796 managers from a large organisation to
examine behaviours rated during employment tenure instead of on
departure. Each behaviour was rated by between eight and ten sources
- from subordinates to supervisors – with ratings combined into
single potential scores. Drawing on staff turnover data, the study
confirmed that individuals exhibiting more derailment potential
behaviours were more likely to later be ejected from the
organisation. In addition, they were more likely to leave early of
their own volition, suggesting they jumped before they were pushed.

The study
also looked beyond the behaviours exhibited to the traits that might
be behind them, through a personality inventory, the Hogan
Development Survey (HDS), that all managers had completed. The
researchers were exploring the philosophy that derailment isn't
caused by a deficit in positive traits such as conscientiousness, but
the presence of additional, unhelpful qualities, measured in the HDS,
that resemble features of clinical disorders. These traits come in
three areas: 'moving away from people' such as a cynical, doubtful
disposition, 'moving against people' including manipulation and a
tendency to drama, and a third area of 'moving towards people'
involving an abiding eagerness to please and defer to others.

Carson's
team predicted each of these areas would predict derailment
behaviours, but in the analysis only one mattered: moving against
people. This factor also predicted turnover of both kinds, and its
effect on turnover was brokered by higher derailment behaviours.
Conversely the 'away' area turned out to relate negatively, but
non-significantly, to the derailment scores, and the 'toward' area
didn't emerge as a coherent factor during preliminary analysis so
wasn't pursued further. The story here, then, is that qualities that
rub up badly against others, such as attention-seeking, idiosyncracy,
over-confidence and rule-bending translate into red-flag behaviours
that predict early exit from the organisation.

What to be
done? This research provides some support for screening for these
types of tendencies early in a manager's career, in order to inform
decisions about future role as well as identifying priority areas for
training and development. These efforts, should they avert
derailment, are likely to pay off in the long run.